Food waste

ants on peony bud

I'm a big advocate of using things up, using things completely, getting as much out of things as possible before discarding them.  That doesn't mean I spend every waking minute trying to account for every piece of trash I produce or every ounce of carbon my activity footprint is responsible for.  But it means that I am aware that we need to take care of our environment and I endeavor to do what I can.  Plus, as I've written about before, I love being efficient.

One of the most important things to me is to take inevitable food waste that results from all the cooking I do, and do something with it besides simply throwing it into the trash, and then into the trash collection truck, and from there into a landfill.  The way I look at it, if I can improve the condition of the soil in my gardens by using the food waste I produce, I see that as a big win.  It saves me the time and the expense of making soil improvements using commercial products that are found in stores.

from my yard

Plus it's kind of fun to peel a bunch of carrots and then take those peelings and just toss them out into one of my planting beds.  Sure I could go ahead and build a big mulching area, but I haven't.  However, my planting beds have soil that has become better conditioned over the years simply from the food waste that I've casually tossed out and left to decompose naturally.  It's made a difference that can be seen in the quality of plants that grow in those areas now compared to years ago when the soil wasn't as rich and full.  I love that cooking feeds me and my family and my friends, but also feeds the earth around me, the environment around me.  I see more insects, I see more organics in the soil, I see better plants, I see more birds that come for the insects, and the chain goes on.

I applaud anyone who makes good use of their food waste in similar fashion.  For those who don't, I understand.  It's hard sometimes to make changes to how we do things.  I'm not perfect either.  But I get tremendous reward from knowing that my food waste goes into the soil and not into the trash, and that feeling keeps me doing it again and again day after day.